


the animals were gone

by jonphaedrus



Category: Steelheart
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Gore, POV Second Person, im sorry im not sorry, murder of children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-08 01:33:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s dust everywhere. All over your hands, all in your lungs. You take a step, and slide down a pile of broken cement and rebar. You stumble, trip, throw out your hands to catch yourself, scrape them on the shattered gravel of a once-floor.</p><p>You look around, dazed and lost. The school, your school, behind you, is all crumbled down and broken, sagging, whole walls pulverised only to dust. Sirens distantly wail, and someone is screaming. A woman’s voice. High, long, petering off into sobs. Something feels distinctly wrong, something is the way it shouldn’t be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the animals were gone

**Author's Note:**

> written to the damien rice song [the animals were gone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zm1rF55IvA)

There’s dust everywhere. All over your hands, all in your lungs. You take a step, and slide down a pile of broken cement and rebar. You stumble, trip, throw out your hands to catch yourself, scrape them on the shattered gravel of a once-floor.

You look around, dazed and lost. The school, your school, behind you, is all crumbled down and broken, sagging, whole walls pulverised only to dust. Sirens distantly wail, and someone is screaming. A woman’s voice. High, long, petering off into sobs. Something feels distinctly wrong, something is the way it shouldn’t be.

Your hands have stopped bleeding, but there’s still blood all over them. You cough, your lungs expelling cement dust, and try to wipe the little tendrils of stone out of your eyes, but they don’t come. Your clothes are all stained grey.

“Sarah?” You call, but there’s no answer. “David? Megan?” Nothing. “Amanda? Daniel?” One by one, your whole class of fifth graders, your children, your girls and boys. You stumble through the wreckage, trying to remember how, exactly, to walk. You keep slipping on roof tiles. Your leg goes through a hole in the floor, and there’s blood everywhere. By the time you get it out, your pants leg ragged and ripped, it’s closed up, stopped bleeding. Somehow that doesn’t seem to matter.

“Louise?” You call, out of names. There’s no response but the distant, fading sirens. The woman has stopped screaming. You move a piece of cement, and it crumbles into dust in your hands without you trying. You feel angry, angry about where your students are. Where did they go?

And then you trip over a piece of rebar, land hard on your knee, slide down and into a pile of desks with a crash, and lurch to your feet.

They’re all there. All twenty-six of them. They lay still, some of them still at their desks. Hannah, always wanting to be with you and nobody else, is sprawled by your chair, bleeding. She just keeps bleeding. George, bravest of all, is collapsed in front of a pile of his posse, hiding behind him to the last.

Their blood is all over you, but you realise it’s been there for a long time. It stains your shoes and your slacks. It’s all up and down your arms, wiped on your face. It’s matting your hair. Your labcoat, with their sharpie’d signatures from the one-hundredth day of school all over the back. It’s got their blood on it.

You put that there.

The dust from the broken in ceiling, you put that there.

You remember punching them, breaking bones and necks. Little skulls crushed beneath your hands. You remember destroying what you could touch. Your throat is hoarse from screaming. Their blood is on you. You put that there. 

You stumble and fall to the ground, lay on your knees in the dust. A piece of paper has fallen off of the back of your desk, a stick-figure drawing of your class, each and every one labelled in careful, precise crayon, and you standing there in the middle, smiling on your stick figure head.

You’re crying, thick and hard. They were so fragile. Like paper and twigs. They were so easy to break. You broke them.

You lay there, in a wreckage of dust and your old, broken life. Their little helpless bodies are like litter around you. You’re crying, and you almost don’t know why.

Above you, Calamity burns, a great red eye, watching you. Judging you.

You put this here. 

You put this here.


End file.
